herbaceous. of, relating to, or having the characteristics of an herb; having little or no woody tissue and persisting usually for a single growing season; having the texture, color, or appearance of a leaf.

i finally stitched my favorite mantra. i've been stitching a lot. i have an idea, i run with it and it feels really good. but, my arm is really tired. its probably good that i'm volunteering at craftcation this weekend. five days off from all day stitching is not a bad idea. i guarantee i'll be back at it immediately when i come home.

bj novak's book will be waiting for me on my nightstand when i get home. i would bring it with but this book is due back first and i'm dying to read this.

i've read a lot of books about gardening these part few months. this blog is like the best of all the information i absorbed from those books and it just appears in my blog reader when action needs to be taken. i LOVE it.

my friends are doing excellent things. hmmm. they could have their own list. maybe i need to bring back friday friends?

i just finished rewatching both veronica mars and buffy the vampire slayer. i have feelings and thoughts. they are many. but for the sake of not annoyiing everyone, i'm going to stick to one thing. choosing teams.

when i saw this video for the veronica movie, i was team logan. i did agree with wallace though, as her best friend, he had to go team piz. i don't know why it didn't occur to me at the time that there needed to be another choice. hint: its not team deputy leo.

spoliers ahead...

i went into this movie wanting them to get back together. i did. i love their chemistry. i love their witty banter. i LOVE this swoony scene between veronica and logan:

so, i wanted them to get back together. until i really didn't. i was rooting for veronica to ditch the life she thought she should have, the one where normal would've been the watchword, for the life she knew was hers, as a girl detective surrounded by people who had her back. but logan didn't always have her back. even after he delivered that epic speech, he was a terrible boyfriend and endangered her life on more than one occasion. why was i team logan again?

when did i stop rooting for logan? when he shows up wearing his dress whites that look three sizes too big. what was that even? besides silly. also, its nine years later and he's still the same old logan. suspected of killing his girlfriend, again. he's still the first one to throw a punch and he still lives with dick, the charismatic man-child* and would-be rapist. its just not charming anymore. team logan no more.

but i'm going to be honest. i did sort of love movie.yeah, i wished there was more mac, more wallace, more keith. i wanted less logan, more VERONICA MARS.

then, i decided to rewatch buffy.

i'd forgotten. i honestly had. i'd forgotten that when it came down to it, team angel or team spike didn't matter. it was all about team slayer and in the end, team buffy. both spike and angel, both kind of terrible boyfriends, understood. and we do too, thanks to that ridiculous but effective unbaked cookie metaphor. she's had the weight of the world on her shoulders for years. now that weight is lifted and she needs to figure out who she is without it, on her own. she is not finished.

neither is veronica. she knows what she needs to do, who she is. she just needs to start living that life. i just wish all of us didn't want her to end up with logan so bad. she'd have been better off without him. team VERONICA.

* i love ryan hansen. its unfortunate that he plays dick and makes him likable. but he does.

i had been listening to jill scott's beautifully human last week and wrote the words "beautifully human" on my to-stitch list. yesterday morning i was wondering how hard it would be to do a gradual color change throughout a word and decided this was the perfect project. i quickly got to work and loved how it came out.

i was excited and posted it to the interwebs. people were liking it and commenting really positively. shawn saw it and loved it.

here's the thing: beautifully is misspelled. dammit.

we went out to dinner and when we returned, a couple hours later, i sat down on the couch to watch walking dead and finishing that night's stitching pile. i took a quick look at this piece sitting there and died a little. "beatifully!" wtf?! i then scurried about the internet, deleting it from all the places i'd posted it. i was mortified.

about fifteen minutes later, i wasn't. at all. i started laughing and couldn't stop. and i couldn't believe that i'd flipped the way i had.

i could write a novel length blog post about this. about how typos were the bane of my existence in my old life and how i had people lining up to point them out. about the "need" to control one's online image. about my new ability to embrace imperfection. but i'm not going to. because this isn't my old life. no one cheerfully called me to point out my mistake. no one seemed to notice it. and i don't actually care about my online image all that much except that i'd like it to be authentically me, typos and all. also, whatever. no big deal. i am human. i make mistakes. i can laugh about them now and even love them a little.

i ignored the rest of my pile for a little while and remade it, smiling through each and every single stitch. beautifully human.

this morning, i asked shawn how he hadn't noticed the mistake. he just laughed and said, "i can't read cursive. all i see is fancy letters and pretty colors." then he very sweetly asked if he could keep "beatifully human." he said the mistake just made it more awesome, more beautiful.

spring. the season after winter and before summer, in which vegetation begins to appear; a resilient device, typically a helical metal coil, that can be pressed or pulled but returns to its former shape when released, used chiefly to exert constant tension or absorb movement; move or jump suddenly or rapidly upward or forward; originate or arise from.

about shana

shana is a wearer of knee socks, lover of pie, horror movies and shiny things. she writes about horror and other things, makes pie and shiny things in portland, oregon, where she lives with her husband, shawn (aka shampton). she is the vintage jewelry and yoyo obsessed woman behind the cookoorikoo curtain. email me at cookoorikoo@gmail.com.